2026-06-18: Missing County Names#
Incident Summary#
Date: June 15, 2026 (Approx. 10:30 – 3:30 Pacific)
On June 15, 2026, Melissa identified an issue affecting the Personator API, AddressCheck v2 API, Lookups and other services that return county names. During this incident, county values were not being returned in API responses where county information would normally be available.
Impact#
Customers utilizing county output fields from affected services may have received blank or missing county values in their API responses during the incident window. All other service functionality continued to operate normally.
Root Cause#
The issue occurred following the deployment of our regularly scheduled monthly GeoCoding data update.
As part of our standard release process, our geocoding reference data undergoes validation and testing prior to deployment. While testing procedures were performed, a communication breakdown occurred regarding the release status of the updated data. A known issue had been identified during the validation process, and the data set should not have proceeded to production deployment until the issue was resolved.
Due to a miscommunication in the release workflow, the deployment was approved and released prematurely, resulting in county information no longer being returned by affected services.
Resolution#
Upon identification of the issue, the Melissa engineering team investigated the problem and took corrective action to restore the affected county data functionality. Service was returned to normal operation after the issue was identified and addressed.
Corrective and Preventative Actions#
Melissa takes service reliability and data quality seriously. Following this incident, we are implementing improvements to both our communication procedures and release management processes, including:
Reviewing and strengthening cross-team communication during data release cycles.
Enhancing release approval and sign-off requirements to ensure all known issues are formally reviewed before deployment.
Improving deployment controls to prevent releases from proceeding without required approvals.
Closing Statement#
We recognize the importance of maintaining accurate and reliable data services for our customers and regret any inconvenience this incident may have caused. Melissa remains committed to continuously improving our processes and safeguards to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Thank you,
Melissa Data Web Service Team